Book Club - The new politics of Poland: A case of post-traumatic sovereignty by Jaroslaw Kuisz

Note: Registration opens one month in advance.

ABSTRACT

The election of populist far-right party Law and Justice in 2015 marked a shocking break in Polish politics. A period of stability was brutally interrupted as Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his allies took over public media and launched a controversial ‘reform’ of the judiciary.

How was this illiberal turn possible after years of democratic development? Jaroslaw Kuisz, one of Poland’s leading liberal thinkers, digs deep into Polish history to propose an original analysis of the crisis. He reveals how centuries of statelessness have left Poles with a ‘post-traumatic’ attitude to sovereignty, making them wary of powerful foreign blocks, be it the EU, the Soviet Union or present-day Russia. This is a phenomenon populists have proved adept at exploiting.

Providing a brilliant account of Europe’s largest illiberal democracy, The new politics of Poland shines a light on the broader situation in East and Central Europe, offering valuable lessons for other countries experiencing the rise of populist right-wing movements.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Editor in Chief, Kultura Liberalna

Dr. Jarosław Kuisz is a writer, essayist and political analyst. He is editor in chief of the Polish intellectual and centrist weekly Kultura Liberalna. He is a policy fellow at the Center for Science and Policy at the University of Cambridge and an associate researcher at l'Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris. 

From 2016 through 2018, Dr. Kuisz was co-director of the Knowledge Bridges Poland-Britain-Europe Project at St. Antony’s College Oxford. Previously, he was a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford, the University of Chicago Law School and Columbia Law School, as well as Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the University of Copenhagen. He is a regular contributor to The New York Times, The Guardian, the Journal of Democracy, Foreign Policy, Le Monde and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. He is also a columnist for Die Tageszeitung. His new book, “PTSD Sovereignty: Poland`s New Politics,” will be published by Manchester University Press in 2023.